Overview of American Art: 1940’s to 1990’s

Speaker: Irving Sandler

August 3, 1997 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Irving Sandler, one of the most eminent art historians of the US, has been a Professor of Art History at State University of New York since 1970. He is the author of a multi-volume history of American Art since 1945; The Triumph of American Painting; A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970); The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978); American Art of the 1960’s (1986); and Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996); as well as books on Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero, and a forthcoming book on Natvar Bhavsar. He is a former president of the American Section of the International Association of Art Critics and a current board member and a former trustee of the Mark Rothko Foundation.

The lecture will survey American Art from 1945 to the present, Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, Realism in the 1950s as exemplified in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the art of the 1960s that reacts against Abstract Expressionism i.e. Pop Art and Minimal Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art in the 1970s, Feminist Art and Pattern and Decoration Painting, and New Image Art in the 1980s, Neo-Expressionist painting, Deconstruction painting, Commodity Art and Neo-Geo.